Tremors rocked through Remy’s body as the last of the infected children thumped to the carpeted floor. Her eyes welled with tears as she stood there, gun still grasped in both hands, horrified sobs threatening to break free at any moment. Her chest hurt, and she realized she was holding her breath. She let it out explosively, nearly dropping her gun from her shaking hands as Ethan turned to her and took her face in his hands.
“Are you okay?” he asked, his eyes meeting hers. Remy looked deep into his green eyes and struggled to find something, anything to say, and she saw the same horror she felt reflected in them. She suddenly felt weak, lost and confused and uncertain of what to do. Where she stood wasn’t anything like what she’d expected when they walked in the Westin. She hadn’t expected to face the idea of shooting a group of children, infected or no. She hadn’t expected to fear for her own survival—something she’d never cared about before. She hadn’t expected to wonder if she’d live past the mission in the hotel, if she’d succumb to the Michaluk virus that might or might not have been coursing through her system.
She’d always mouthed off about how she wasn’t afraid to die, how she’d always known she’d fall at the hands of the infected, fighting them in revenge for what they’d done to her family. She’d lived a life driven by the idea of vengeance, of slaughtering the infected wherever she found them. But now, surrounded by dead children she’d helped kill, Remy questioned whether her goal, her decision to instigate a lifelong war against the infected, had been a right one.
It wouldn’t bring her family back. It wouldn’t return her mother to her, or her stepfather. It wouldn’t bring back her baby sister. It wouldn’t bring back Ethan’s wife. It wouldn’t bring back Cade’s niece or boyfriend. It wouldn’t bring back Theo or Gray or Nikola or anyone else who’d died at the hands of the infected. It wouldn’t bring back anybody.
Remy had the sinking sensation she’d become the very thing she hated so much.
She was suddenly, overwhelmingly consumed by a fear of death.
“Remy!” Ethan snapped for the second time that evening. “Focus! We have to get moving!”
Remy shook her head, not in refusal but in a vain attempt to rattle the thoughts from her brain. Now, standing in this hotel, wasn’t the best time to dwell on and regret her past actions and motivations. She could save that for later. She forced another breath into and out of her lungs before finally speaking, her voice trembling with an excess of emotion.
“Okay, what now?” she asked.
Ethan waved his gun carelessly toward the other end of the hall. “Let’s go find out what’s on the other side of that door,” he suggested. “I’d ask if you’re feeling up to it, but you don’t really have much of a choice. I need backup, and you’re the only option I’ve got.”
“No, no, I’m okay,” Remy tried to assure him. She slid her bolo knife free from its sheath, gripping it tightly in her hand and feeling a pang of pain radiate through her forearm, through the bite wound in her flesh. She tried to take comfort in the weapon, in the hands that had held it before hers: family she’d never known, extending back through the years. “I’ll be okay. I have to be.”
Ethan clapped her gently on the shoulder and motioned with a hand. “Just don’t look down if you can help it,” he instructed. “Keep your eyes on me. I won’t let you fall.”
His last sentence seemed so loaded with double meaning that Remy’s breath almost caught in her throat again. She swallowed it down and nodded, trailing behind him, obediently keeping her eyes locked onto his back as he’d instructed her to do. She ignored everything around her, everything that made her surroundings so horrifying: the blood on the walls, the stains on the carpet, the bodies of the children on the floor. Despite all that she’d seen over the past year, even Remy could recognize that this would have topped the list of the most disturbing scenes she’d ever witnessed. The scent of rot and decay—a scent always there but somehow adapted to and ignored—was already becoming more pervasive. Ethan’s broad shoulders were a much more pleasant sight than anything else in the hallway.
It took only a few more minutes to reach the door around which the now-dead children had clustered. If Remy strained her ears, she could make out the sound of someone—maybe even a child—inside the room, crying. She pushed past Ethan to the door, trying the knob. The door was locked, and she grimaced and knocked on it firmly with her knuckles.
“Hello? Is anybody in there?” she called through the door.
“Remy,” Ethan hissed. She glanced in his direction and saw he wore a grimace. “Not so fucking loud.”
“Well how else am I supposed to make myself heard?” she asked pointedly, knocking on the door again. “Hello?”
A small-sounding voice called out from the other side of the door, meek and terrified. “Are the monsters gone?” a little girl asked, the words shaking and trembling.
“Yeah, honey, they’re gone,” Ethan replied, even as he shifted his gaze over the hall, watching for movement. “Can you unlock the door? We need to get you out of here.”
There was a rustling on the other side of the door and then the sound of a lock snapping open. A long pause followed before the door swung open, and a small black girl with wide brown eyes peered out of the crack, her expression wary and fearful as she looked first at Remy and then at Ethan. A tiny smile crossed her face. “I know you,” she said. “You’re Mr. Bennett.”
“And you’re … is it Shae?” Ethan asked, much to Remy’s surprise.
The girl shook her head. “That’s my sister. I’m Sasha.” She opened the door wider, and Ethan took a step toward her. She didn’t look much older than eight, Remy observed, though she handled herself with a surprising amount of poise, making Remy think of someone much older. “Mama left and didn’t come back,” Sasha explained. “And then all the screaming out in the hall started, and then all the other kids were trying to get in to us. I locked the doors like Mama always told me to, and we hid under the bed.”
“You did good, sweetheart,” Ethan said in an oddly sweet voice Remy had never heard from him before. “Where’s your sister?”
“Still under the bed.”
“Go get her. We’re going to get you out of here,” Ethan said. Sasha looked at Remy doubtfully, and Ethan added, “This is Remy. She’s cool. She’s a friend of mine and is here to help.”
Sasha still looked doubtful, but she nodded and unlatched the security chain, stepping back to let them both in. Remy let Ethan take the lead, and together they stepped into the hotel room in which two children and their mother had spent the past months of their lives.
It wasn’t quite what Remy had anticipated. She’d expected the people here to be living quite comfortably, especially considering they’d been staying in what used to be a five-star hotel for the duration of their trials—or at least since Alicia Day had picked them up. Instead, the first thing that hit her was the stench. It absolutely stank in that hotel room. It was a combination of garbage, sweat, food, and inadequate ventilation. It was a smell that brought horrible memories to the forefront of Remy’s mind, sending her back to when she was sixteen and in New Orleans, when the floodwaters came and sent her entire family—too poor to flee and left to their own devices—scurrying for the only refuge they had: the Superdome. People there had lived like animals, had seemingly lost all sense of civility and humanity. It seemed that same condition had begun to take hold here. It wasn’t the children’s fault, not at all. Humans just weren’t meant to live like this, stuck in such secluded areas with no place to safely go. Her heart hurt for them.
Ethan had dropped to his knees and was trying to coax a small, frightened toddler out into the open when Remy heard a noise in the hallway. Ethan heard it too; his head jerked up and banged against the underside of the bed. He let out a pained grunt and turned to tell Remy to check it out, but she was already moving, sliding to the door and leaning at just the right angle to see into the hall beyond without exposing herself. Her shoulders ached with how tense they’d become, but she chose to ignore it as she spotted two shadowy figures near the stairwell door at the opposite end of the hall from where she and Ethan had entered. She stiffened even more, and then, as her eyes focused on and recognized the figures, she let out a laugh.
“Shit, I was wondering when you two would show the hell up!” she said joyously as Cade and Brandt approached. Her happiness at seeing them alive and well was quickly stifled when she caught a glimpse of the blood matted on the side of Brandt’s head and Cade’s swollen jaw. Not to mention the looks in their eyes. Something bothered them, something that overshadowed the victorious fist-pumping she’d have thought they would have done upon reuniting with them. She raised an eyebrow but, instead of commenting on it, settled on asking, “Either of you guys hurt bad?”
“Nothing we won’t recover from,” Cade replied flippantly. Remy skimmed her eyes over the woman again and realized she was loaded down with guns and knives and ammunition magazines, far more than she’d brought on the mission. Brandt was similarly outfitted. Remy raised an eyebrow, but before she could form any words, Cade added, “We found a lot of goodies in Alicia’s room. Figured we’d take what we could, because we can use it. And hell, I found my rifle too!” She held the weapon up triumphantly, a smile crossing her face as she showed it off. “You guys okay?”
Remy hesitated and glanced at Ethan. He shook his head at her slightly, almost imperceptibly, before going back to trying to get the little girl from under the bed. She turned back to Cade and answered, “Yeah, we’re fine. Few sticky spots getting up here, but nothing we couldn’t handle.”
Cade nodded vacantly, and Remy looked to Brandt. The older man stared down the hallway, no doubt at the abnormally small bodies littering the carpet. He didn’t look at her as he said, “Sticky spots, huh?”
“Something like that.” Remy tried to not let her disturbed feeling over what they’d done show, and she faced Ethan again. He’d coaxed the toddler from under the bed with Sasha’s help, and he picked the girl up and settled her against his hip before nodding to the door.
“What do you say we get the hell out of here?” Ethan suggested, extending his free hand to Sasha. She took it, clutching it tightly. “I’m tired of looking at this place.”
“Where are the others?” Cade asked, her eyes shifting to the blond man behind Remy. “Don’t we need to look for—”
“There are no others,” Remy warned softly, slipping past her into the hall. “This is all we’ve found.”
“My God,” Cade whispered in horror. “All of them?”
“Unless you want to pick through what’s left of them at the end of the hall,” Remy said irritably, “then yeah, that’s it.”
“Fuck,” Cade breathed.
“Let’s go out the way Cade and I came in,” Brandt suggested. “Then we won’t have to take the kids back through the … the mess.”
“We should hurry too,” Remy said, glancing at the watch on her left wrist. “We’ve already been in here going on forty-five minutes. Isaac and Dominic aren’t supposed to wait longer than an hour.”
“I know that,” Brandt muttered impatiently. “Look, me and Cade will take the lead and deal with anything coming at us from the front. Remy, you’re in the back. Ethan, stay in the middle with the kids.” He looked at them again, and his eyes met Remy’s. For the briefest of moments, she could have sworn he gave her a look that said he knew everything about what had happened while she and Ethan were separated from them, and her stomach flipped over. Brandt didn’t say anything further, though. He just motioned to them all and headed down the hall, tugging Cade with him and making for the stairwell door.